Whither Japan-III-Secrecy Act

     On the night of 6 December 2013, almost the midnight, the coalition majority in the Upper House of Japan's Parliament passed the Secrecy Act, winding up the debate forcefully.  It had already been passed by the Lower House, and thus became an Act, amid the widening opposition among the people.   They were gradually becoming aware that this was a repressive law.  The government, with absolute majorities in both houses, did not want to wait for that awakening.

     The law proposes to set aside a large area of information in the hands of the government, defence and diplomacy to begin with, in the realm of secrecy and to punish those who are responsible for giving this secrecy out up to ten years of imprisonment.  The people are not supposed to know even what is in that realm of secrecy.  So it is a Black Act.  Moreover, those who are in a position to handle the secret information, and not only they but even their family and close friends, are going to be minutely researched upon by the police and the various information agencies.

     Some say that without such a law ready at hand, your allies will hesitate to share their secrecy with you.  True, there has been pressure by the US upon us to have such a legislation(this kind of information may be classified as secret from now on!).  But do we have to have that kind of high-level secret information at the expense of the popular rights?  Is the existing criminal law not enough?  The US is of course a democratic country.  But she has been pressing us to delete the Article 9 from our constitution, to accept the collective right for self-defence as something exercisable, maintain their military bases at Okinawa, and so on. It is dangerous to follow everything that they say.  And look at how our own government dislikes to, and is not used to, share information with the people who are supposed to be sovereign according to our constitution. They, for example, has not admitted that there exist some secret treaties with the US which the US admitted a long time ago.  It is this government that wants more power, and an undefined one. Ooe Kenzaburo, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, said that this Secrecy Law changes the nature of the Japanese state without changing the constitution.  Any opinion poll would show that more than half the voters will support Mr.Ooe.    

      

Whither Japan-II, Abe's Yasukuni Visit

     Yesterday, on 26 December 2013, Prime Minister Abe visited Yasukuni Shirine.  It is not an ordinary Shinto Shrine.  The Shinto, an indigenous religion of this country was always combined with Buddhism and received a theoretical backing from it.  Yasukuni, on the other hand, was established and supported by the State to enshrine those who had died in the wars, mostly external wars once the period of the civil wars was over during the early Meiji era.  My generation, who were in the primary school during the Second World War, was told to dedicate our lives to the Emperor and the country and to be enshrined there.  'See you at Yasukuni', even the small boys used to say, let alone the men.

     So when Abe told us that he went there to pray for no more war, we are at a loss.  If you glorify the death in the last war, you will be glorifying the war itself.  This is not an Unknown Soldier's Tomb, and Abe is intentionally mixing them up.  That is why the two US Secretaries who were here in October on a official visit did not come to this Shrine but to a different tomb nearby which is much more like an Unknown Soldier's Tomb.  Incidentally there is a map inscribed in the stone there showing roughly how many Japanese soldiers lost their lives in different theatres in the war.  Many lost their lives far away in different parts of the Pacific of starvation and illness. What for?  Abe would say that that is why he went to Yasukuni to thank them, and to pray to their souls.  But if you justify and glorify the past war, you will be getting ready to justify the future war as well.

     I had to say that because that is what the Shrine is engaging in. justifying and glorifying the past wars of this country.  It has enshrined 14 defendants, all convicted at the Tokyo Tribunal, including all the seven executed, in 1987.  The late Emperor wisely stopped visiting it afterwards, and the present one not once.  Most of these had a role to play in China, and elsewhere in Asia also.  Nowadays the Shrine is a huge institution propagating the justice of the war, and the injustice of the Tokyo Tribunal.  Thus they are challenging the legitimacy of the post-war world.

     Yesterday the US Embassy in Tokyo did not hide their disappointment.  That was a correct attitude.  They should know whom, what kind of people, they were calling their allies.  They should also know their Cold War policy had a great hand in the growth of those allies.  Thus they are in a dilemma.  And so is Abe.    

Whither Japan - I

     On 17 December, Prime Minister Abe's Cabinet approved the National Security Strategy and two related documents on defence planning.  Together they will determine the country's diplomatic and security stance for the coming decade.  They do leave, however, a lot to be desired.
     First and foremost they are not clear how to build better relations with China and DPRK.  Are they going to be Japan's enemies, or otherwise, and if the latter, how to build meaningful communication with them.  The documents describe them mainly as threats to our security. Foreign correspondents in Japan seem to be surprised that Abe does not want to have, and is not actually having, dialogue with China.  It is not at all our dishonour to extend our hands to China, and even to DPRK.
     To put it in a different way, we are saying that since China, or DPRK, has taken such and such a military measure, we have to do something to counter their move.  Where is the diplomacy, then? The documents say that diplomacy has also its role to play.  But have we let it play it?  The other day Abe wanted the US Vice President to play a mediator between Japan and China, and Japan and South Korea.  Despite the Vice President's effort the story collapsed. Apparently he had more serious business to attend to.  Abe should have done it himself.
     The US influence on Japan's defence thinking is as strong as ever in the documents.  They make a clear reference to the US nuclear deterrence.  What a dishonour for a country with tens of thousands of nuclear bomb victims to depend on the US nuclear deterrence!  At the same time the documents are full of animosity toward China and DPRK, especially the former.  The regional emphasis of defence as a whole will move to the southwestern Japan, with the formation of an amphibious unit modeled on the US Marine Corp, more destroyers, more fighter and reconnaissance planes to be based at Naha airbase, Okinawa, etc., which are all military in nature.
     One more thing is that the documents call for loosening the existing restraint on arms export.  After the Second World War nobody in any remote corner of the world has been killed by weapons exported from Japan and that is a really great achievement.  The UN Secretary General at the press conference on 16 December highly evaluated the first ever treaty on the restraining the trade of conventional weapons signed in the course of the year 2013.
     The Japanese people will strive to find a more peaceful way to cope with the tension in East Asia.  At the same time we strongly wish China to give up their claim to Senkaku Islands, as it is a baseless claim spurred by the interest in natural resources in the area, and wish DPRK to give up their nuclear program, as it goes against not just one but more of the international treaties and communiques that they have signed.  If they do so, the above documents will instantly lose most of their legitimacy.  Who will have the honour of breaking the vicious circle?             

Ahmed Kathrada

     Regretfully this was the first time I have come to know his name, person, and career.  But let me say that he was outstanding among the mourners of the late Nelson Mandela.

     Kathrada was one of Mandela's real comrades in struggle.  He was in prison for twenty-six years, one year shorter than Mandela, whom he called his elder brother, mentor, leader.  They stood trial together and were sentenced to life imprisonment together.  Kathrada concluded his speech, short but impassioned and moving, by 'My life is in a void.  I don't know who to turn to'.

     From his name I guessed that he must be of Indian origin, and perhaps a descendant of one of those Indian Muslim merchants who were in South Africa when Gandhi was.  I have also found that his ancestors were from Surat, on the western coast of India.

     Last year I had the pleasure of visiting Surat to interview Mr.Narayan Desai about Gandhi whose father was Gandhi's principal secretary until his premature death in 1942.  If I can interview Desai, Kathrada's fellow Gujarati and even senior to him by several years, although not a Muslim but a Hindu, I may be allowed to entertain a dream of interviewing Kathrada also!

     I am sure Kathrada will start working, even in a void, for solving those problems he did not name there.  I wish him good health.      

Mandela Has Passed Away

     Mr. Nelson Mandela died in the evening of 5 December, local time, at the age of 95.  The thought of him being no more makes me very sad.  I cannot think of any other such person living at present.  When I heard the news in the morning of 6 December, I happened to be reading writings of Gandhi. Then the voice of the Prime Minister of Britain began to come in, saying that 'Tonight one of the brightest lights of our world has gone out'.  When Gandhi was assassinated 65 years ago, India's Prime Minister Nehru broadcast to the nation, 'the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere'.

     The whole life of Mandela is worth knowing.  What interests me most, a humble student of Gandhi, is how Mandela, who had been of the view when he was imprisoned that non-violence was useless against apartheid in South Africa, was transformed into a firm believer in Truth and Reconciliation when he was out after 27 years in 1990.  Indeed, it must be beyond our imagination how much the Commission by that name chaired by Desmond Tutu helped achieve to bring about inter-racial good-will and to make South Africa united, when the country could well have been thrown even into a civil war.  At the time of the first election in 1994, people of different races were seen standing in the same lines to the voting stations, and giving food and drinks to one another.  I felt then that we were witnessing history being made.

     But in order to transform himself like this, he must have taken an enormous effort, maybe together with some of his co-prisoners.  This experience was shared by Gandhi also, but in Mandela's case the period in jail was much longer, and 18 years of them he had to live in a small island named Robben.  When he came out of prison, I was just beginning to think how difficult it would be for an aging person to be isolated from the world outside, particularly in a cell, without a hope to be released.  But witnesses say that while breaking stones, he made friends of white jailors and even read Shakespeare, etc.  Some one said on the BBC that 'he created himself' in the prison.

     I had an opportunity to spend one day in Johannesburg in 1983 on my way to observe a newly-independent Zimbabwe just north of it.  That one day was, of course, far from enough to understand the apardheid regime, but still it was much better than nothing.  I saw "white only" carriages of a train which would stop by the "white only" stairs leading up to the white station, and the other carriages of the same train leading up to the non-white station, and these two stations were far away from each other overground.

     The mention of Zimbabwe reminds us that the power does get corrupt.  It was a real stroke of political genius that Mandela chose to serve as President for only one term of five years.  He did not try to build a dynasty. This must be a lesson to all the people in power, including his successors in South Africa.  May peace be with him.